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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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Pinker is certainly more of a popular science writer (and, indeed, has been one of the key figures in linguistics bringing Chomsky’s ideas to a wider audience). But I’ll let you watch some of that debate and see what you think.
On capitalism: Wokko and Mugwump, I lay no claim to being any kind of expert on Marxism, but my impression is that some of Marx’s arguments on this topic may surprise you. For one, a core aspect of his argument was that capitalism was, indeed, an improvement on all the systems that had preceded it (and also a system doomed to collapse as a resut of its own internal inconsistencies and rampant inequalities). One can assign the improvements in our lives since the mid-19th century to capitalism, but it would be convenient to forget the actively socialist aspects of that system that have also flourished since that time: ideas we now take for granted such as welfare, progressive taxation, labour rights (including the minimum wage and the eight-hour working day), child labour laws and socialised medicine. Take all of those things away and we would live in a capitalist system every bit as cruel as Marx envisaged (and, indeed, witnessed), and likely one ripe for revolution.
But even with the increases in standard of living that we’ve achieved through this mix of capitalism and socialism, we in the west have still profited from centuries of colonial and postcolonial exploitation conducted on our behalf, while wars fought for profit have painted a much bloodier global picture than our quiet suburban lives attest to. So, one and a half cheers for capitalism, I suppose – but let’s not forget the costs of the wealth that we enjoy.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| David wrote: | Pinker is certainly more of a popular science writer (and, indeed, has been one of the key figures in linguistics bringing Chomsky’s ideas to a wider audience). But I’ll let you watch some of that debate and see what you think.
On capitalism: Wokko and Mugwump, I lay no claim to being any kind of expert on Marxism, but my impression is that some of Marx’s arguments on this topic may surprise you. For one, a core aspect of his argument was that capitalism was, indeed, an improvement on all the systems that had preceded it (and also a system doomed to collapse as a resut of its own internal inconsistencies and rampant inequalities). One can assign the improvements in our lives since the mid-19th century to capitalism, but it would be convenient to forget the actively socialist aspects of that system that have also flourished since that time: ideas we now take for granted such as welfare, progressive taxation, labour rights (including the minimum wage and the eight-hour working day), child labour laws and socialised medicine. Take all of those things away and we would live in a capitalist system every bit as cruel as Marx envisaged (and, indeed, witnessed), and likely one ripe for revolution.
But even with the increases in standard of living that we’ve achieved through this mix of capitalism and socialism, we in the west have still profited from centuries of colonial and postcolonial exploitation conducted on our behalf, while wars fought for profit have painted a much bloodier global picture than our quiet suburban lives attest to. So, one and a half cheers for capitalism, I suppose – but let’s not forget the costs of the wealth that we enjoy. |
Like all good 20-year old Arts graduates, I flirted with Marxism, and I read a lot of it, impenetrable though much of it is. Hell, I even devoured two days annotating the Grundrisse, in the Portsea Hotel, in about 1982. At some point, that reading leads anyone with an open mind to an inescapable conclusion : Marx’s economics were idle and wrong, his historical determinism was a denial of the potential for adaptive politics (of the type you describe), and his political conclusions were a fermenting, humid compost for state despotism. Taken all together, he should long ago have become a footnote in history - as wrong as phrenology, though far more harmful. The one thing that might rescue his standing is his powerful realization that ideas are, at bottom, representations of interests, though I doubt it’s really his discovery.
The idea that the rich west is “socialist” doesn’t really stand analysis. We have social programmes, of course : even in Adam Smith’s day there were taxes for common goals and infrastructure. But the system of economic relations - the ownership of the means of production, and the laws governing competition, primary distribution and exchange - are clearly essentially capitalist. It’s the adoption of those relations, and the retreat of government and socialist economic relations,that has powered so many Indians and Chinese out of poverty. That, I assume, was Wokko’s point.
Post-colonial legacy is a red herring in this debate, really. Germany had very little by way of empire, and lost all its wealth twice between 1914-45. Singapore and China were themselves colonies, the US has not been an empire in the sense of controlling and directing puppet governments. All of these non-empires, in their own way, have shown the success of market economics. Portugal was a major empire, and it is poor. Spain is less poor, but hardly a shining success. Both were protectionist, almost autarkic, with powerful Labour rigidities since at least the 1970s. So imperialism doesn’t explain much at all, at this point, except architectural grandeur and museum exhibits. Markets work faster than grievance, lamentation and Arts faculties.
Market economies work best because wealth comes from increasing productivity, which comes from responsive allocation of capital stock, plus diffusion of risk, plus the incentives of competition. The vast efficiencies these create allow greater investment in human development. Once a governing class has grasped this essential point, it can start on the route to financing the kinds of social programmes for which socialists like to claim credit. Regardless, the abandonment of Marxist despotism in response to its failure, and the adoption of market economics, has powered much the rise of human welfare discussed above.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| K wrote: | Bad news gets people's attention. Good news is typically not actually all that newsworthy. The news every night is thus strongly biased negative.
As for Nicholas Kristof ... Well... Sigh... |
And hugely, hugely blown out of proportion! When my eldest was three I was at a warehouse shopping for my business, and she picked up some ratsac and I didn’t know if she had eaten any. I panicked and drove to the nearest hospital St Vincents, as the children’s was over the other side of town. They did a video link to the children’s asking what to do, she drank charcoal in a can of coke basically! (She hadn’t actually swallowed any thank god) and the doc says”hey it’s the first time we’ve used this technology, do you mind if we document it?” So I’m like ok yeah, thinking 5 min picture on the wall kinda thing, next thing there’s 2 tv crews there, newspapers and a doctor giving my 18 month old a bottle! I get home hours later to the phone ringing off the hook, we were the lead story a week after port Arthur, and on every add break - “New technology saves the life of a 3 year old! “ Page 3 of the age and sun, huge picture, was great for her 21st! And when they actually saved a life with it 6 months later, there we were again!
Now I take everything they say with a grain of salt., and needless to say, I mostly left the kids with grandma or nan when I shopped after that!
I really don’t sit and watch the news, hubby yells out when sport comes on, I’ll either be checking out Facebook while I finish dinner, or starting on any paperwork or emails he needs me to do for work. It’s too depressing I agree!
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Mugwump wrote: | | David wrote: | Pinker is certainly more of a popular science writer (and, indeed, has been one of the key figures in linguistics bringing Chomsky’s ideas to a wider audience). But I’ll let you watch some of that debate and see what you think.
On capitalism: Wokko and Mugwump, I lay no claim to being any kind of expert on Marxism, but my impression is that some of Marx’s arguments on this topic may surprise you. For one, a core aspect of his argument was that capitalism was, indeed, an improvement on all the systems that had preceded it (and also a system doomed to collapse as a resut of its own internal inconsistencies and rampant inequalities). One can assign the improvements in our lives since the mid-19th century to capitalism, but it would be convenient to forget the actively socialist aspects of that system that have also flourished since that time: ideas we now take for granted such as welfare, progressive taxation, labour rights (including the minimum wage and the eight-hour working day), child labour laws and socialised medicine. Take all of those things away and we would live in a capitalist system every bit as cruel as Marx envisaged (and, indeed, witnessed), and likely one ripe for revolution.
But even with the increases in standard of living that we’ve achieved through this mix of capitalism and socialism, we in the west have still profited from centuries of colonial and postcolonial exploitation conducted on our behalf, while wars fought for profit have painted a much bloodier global picture than our quiet suburban lives attest to. So, one and a half cheers for capitalism, I suppose – but let’s not forget the costs of the wealth that we enjoy. |
Like all good 20-year old Arts graduates, I flirted with Marxism, and I read a lot of it, impenetrable though much of it is. Hell, I even devoured two days annotating the Grundrisse, in the Portsea Hotel, in about 1982. At some point, that reading leads anyone with an open mind to an inescapable conclusion : Marx’s economics were idle and wrong, his historical determinism was a denial of the potential for adaptive politics (of the type you describe), and his political conclusions were a fermenting, humid compost for state despotism. Taken all together, he should long ago have become a footnote in history - as wrong as phrenology, though far more harmful. The one thing that might rescue his standing is his powerful realization that ideas are, at bottom, representations of interests, though I doubt it’s really his discovery.
The idea that the rich west is “socialist” doesn’t really stand analysis. We have social programmes, of course : even in Adam Smith’s day there were taxes for common goals and infrastructure. But the system of economic relations - the ownership of the means of production, and the laws governing competition, primary distribution and exchange - are clearly essentially capitalist. It’s the adoption of those relations, and the retreat of government and socialist economic relations,that has powered so many Indians and Chinese out of poverty. That, I assume, was Wokko’s point.
Post-colonial legacy is a red herring in this debate, really. Germany had very little by way of empire, and lost all its wealth twice between 1914-45. Singapore and China were themselves colonies, the US has not been an empire in the sense of controlling and directing puppet governments. All of these non-empires, in their own way, have shown the success of market economics. Portugal was a major empire, and it is poor. Spain is less poor, but hardly a shining success. Both were protectionist, almost autarkic, with powerful Labour rigidities since at least the 1970s. So imperialism doesn’t explain much at all, at this point, except architectural grandeur and museum exhibits. Markets work faster than grievance, lamentation and Arts faculties.
Market economies work best because wealth comes from increasing productivity, which comes from responsive allocation of capital stock, plus diffusion of risk, plus the incentives of competition. The vast efficiencies these create allow greater investment in human development. Once a governing class has grasped this essential point, it can start on the route to financing the kinds of social programmes for which socialists like to claim credit. Regardless, the abandonment of Marxist despotism in response to its failure, and the adoption of market economics, has powered much the rise of human welfare discussed above. |
I just read this short piece today on Marx from our old friend Guy Rundle, which I think provides a useful analysis of some the merits and shortcomings of his arguments:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2018/05/10/the-crisis-in-the-marxist-tradition/
| Quote: | The Crisis in the Marxist Tradition
Guy Rundle
OK, so Marx, and the Marxist tradition, got a description correct in many respects of the way capitalism is working now. The important point to remember is that Marx isn’t a bounded “philosopher” like Aquinas or Locke, arguing for an eternal, particular truth — he had a specific argument about the way capitalism worked at the time. But he also had a general theory of how knowledge worked — that we must assume a material, extended world of knowable processes; that we ourselves transform, as a species that has come to acquire consciousness and the possibility of projective action.
Marx thus contemplated that large parts of his particular theory could be overthrown. Indeed, as Gareth Steadman Jones’ recent biography reveals, he was convinced by the 1870s that Capital would have to be redone. And it was.
But the crucial point is that Marx is not simply Marx. He’s Hilferding, whose 1910 Finance Capital could be seen as volume five of Capital (Volume four? Too complicated to explain). He’s Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, whose 1964 Monopoly Capital is a pretty good account of Facebook, Google, etc, from half a century away; Samir Amin, whose account of systematic underdevelopment Accumulation On a World Scale shows why China roared ahead, while India has put a light overlay of urbanism across stagnation, and large parts of Africa have gone backwards. He’s all these, and more, and I choose them because they have followed the straight-arrow “Marxian” economic tradition.
What did Marx and the Marxists get wrong at a deep level? The greatest challenge was from the Austrian tradition, which first tackled Marx in Bohm-Bawerk’s Karl Marx and the Close of his System, which argued that Marx had compared apples and angle-grinders in his argument as to how a deep structure of “value” — as cost of production — related to prices. Bohm-Bawerk suggested that two different ways of doing that in Capital showed a sleight-of-hand, which made a fall in the rate of profit appear inevitable, when there was no such guarantee.
The “transformation problem” debate has continued for a century. Marx had never said that the rate of profit would bust through all other conditions to doom capital mathematically. Cartel-isation, monopoly and capitalist state terror could potentially keep the thing bubbling along until the organised working class ended it. For the most part, he saw capitalism as a system with, potentially, a long way to go.
The Austrians also made a challenge as to how any form of steered socialism could work — “the problem of the millions” — but that was about socialism, rather than capitalism per se. The most serious challenge came from the “neo-Ricardian” Piero Sraffa, with his 1960 book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory.
In this 60-page work, Sraffa showed that both Marx and marginal utilitarians took certain variables as constants to ground their theories. Marx, for Sraffa, is a rival post-Ricardian, who takes human labour as a special type of production input, and assigns it a value at a certain time, and then generalises that to a production process over a time series in ways that do not cohere; marginal utilitarians by contrast do not acknowledge that the circular mathematics of product “switching” render the real calculation of marginal advantage simply magical thinking (this is one base of Steve Keen’s assault on economics as a “naked emperor”). (This is my ham-fisted take; I’m open to correction).
Sraffa was a leftist — a friend and supporter of the Italian communist Gramsci — and his argument was political; a capitalist state could keep capitalism going by endlessly resetting wage/profit ratios, interest rates, etc. (Sraffa, a Cambridge man, was also more or less a co-author of Keynes’s General Theory, and many of the ideas leading to the Bretton Woods post-World War II order are arguably, partly at least, his). In 1978, Ian Steedman produced Marx After Sraffa, which expounded the argument in great detail, and more or less smashed “inevitabilist” Marxism to pieces. The book sent a generation of ’60s/’70s Marxist intellectuals out of the movement altogether, and towards postmodernism and post-Marxist politics.
Since then, there have been renewed challenges to the Sraffian critique, from schools such as the TSSI group, and others (don’t ask). And, in historical terms, we can see that the end of capitalism is being talked about by everyone. So what’s happening, and where’s the revolutionary working class who were going to deliver the killing blow? |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ that sounds like a long form of my comment : Marx’s economics were incomplete where not downright erroneous, and his politics simplistic in theory and evil in practice.
Without indulging in Rundle’s literature review, KM’s main economic fallacy (of several) can be simply put : he argued that the rate of profit would fall, owing to technological innovation arising from the accumulation (and deployment) of capital, and that this would lead to a reserve army of the unemployed and a progressive driving down of wages. This has simply proven to be flatly untrue, and it is not hard to see why : it’s a reductively supply-sided analysis. He took no account of changes in demand - the rising demand for innovative products and the new consumers created by the middle and unionized working class. He’s a one-hand clapper.
He also reposes enormous faith in the Labour theory of value, and even rests his sketchy and scant theory of money and finance on it. The fact that people are still arguing, centuries later, about what this central theory really means, let alone whether it has any use in practice, is about as damning an indictment of a major intellectual project as could be imagined.
His painted edifice surely survives because it has underpinned many of the most vicious totalitarian regimes which have disgraced modern history. Yet the romanticism lingers. Perhaps it always will, for many intellectuals secretly love a tyranny : they think they will run it, until it exists.
He was not a fraud : he made a brave attempt to make sense of the facts of his time, using the rather mystical Hegelian philosophy of his time, but he made far less sense of those facts than did Keynes, Ricardo, Adam Smith, or Friedman. It’s time we stopped talking about him, and got back to serious economics, which is shaky enough without his airy philosophical chimeras.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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| Did not Robert Solow win the Nobel economics prize for work that has been paraphrased as showing that the rising standard of living is basically all due to technology? (And is it not the case that technological development has occurred -- and been both aided and hindered -- by all sorts of political ideologies?) |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ he did, and Capitalism’s strength is really in the way it drives this type of technological progress. By allocating capital efficiently, diffusing risk,and encouraging innovation in the search for profit, it drives productivity and living standards. That is why the Germanies on each side of the Wall looked so different after forty years.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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I think all these ideologies are basically bullshit. People love to put labels on things.
Things evolve and change. A number of things influence how things change and you get swings and roundabouts as things go up and down.
Western society has come from feudal lords, slaves and servants, to a place where people have access to education and paid employment and a quality of life that people 100 years ago would have thought nirvana.
In a democratic society, moods change and politicians channel that. People who base their ideologies on ancient texts are ideologues, whether they are religious, marxist, or any other variant.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ we put labels on things because they are different. It’s called language. I don’t think you believe that the difference in living under a basically capitalist vs a basically socialist/communist system is just a label.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Mugwump wrote: | | ^ he did, and Capitalism’s strength is really in the way it drives this type of technological progress. By allocating capital efficiently, diffusing risk,and encouraging innovation in the search for profit, it drives productivity and living standards. That is why the Germanies on each side of the Wall looked so different after forty years. |
Certainly, one can mount an argument that automation has played a large role in rising living standards, as much as it has always brought (sometimes catastrophic) complications with it. It seems superficially plausible to assign the praise for that to capitalism, as much technological development and mainstream implementation thereof has occurred with profit in mind; but then, do we also assign parallel Soviet tech advances to capitalism? Clearly, the story is a little more complicated than this. I suspect that K is right: tech development is not itself a result of any economic tradition per se, but rather one driven by necessity and suitable conditions in which it can be fostered.
I think it’s tempting but misleading to pin the failings of Stalinism on an inadequate embrace of capitalism. Of course, if we could, then the argument would effectively be over.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ it’s not whether technological advances can be made under socialism... it’s the rate at which they are made. Technological progress is cumulative, so the rate matters hugely. History is startlingly clear about it. Capitalist systems are a superior engine, but that engine still needs government and social systems to moderate its externalities. I have no argument with that. Marx just addresses none of these things effectively. The dustbin of history awaits.
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Two more flags before I die!
Last edited by Mugwump on Tue May 15, 2018 8:29 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Mugwump wrote: | | ^ we put labels on things because they are different. It’s called language. I don’t think you believe that the difference in living under a basically capitalist vs a basically socialist/communist system is just a label. |
No, the difference is in how the society works, not the label affixed to it.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| stui magpie wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | | ^ we put labels on things because they are different. It’s called language. I don’t think you believe that the difference in living under a basically capitalist vs a basically socialist/communist system is just a label. |
No, the difference is in how the society works, not the label affixed to it. |
Sure, but who’s disagreeing with that ? When you talk about how society works, you use words that denote existing and historic systems of organisation.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| Can you speak any other languages? |
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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